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Popular Culture Review
defined by the focusing of the player’s self-conscious attention on the
interaction between his or her body and the surface of the instrument. Rehearsals
are experienced as moments of highly directed self-surveillance of the sensing
body. Performances, on the other hand, are characterised by a distinct lack of
self-attention paid to the points at which musician and instrument meet, to the
point that musicians describe performances as experiences of becoming their
instruments, or, in other words, of becoming wholly instrumentalised.
During my fieldwork, rehearsal periods could, and often did, involve
playing music in front of groups of people visiting the institution in which the
band members work. Simply playing in front of people did not, for band
members, constitute performance. Conversely, rehearsal moments occurred fi*om
time to time during performances when band members found themselves
engaging in the particularly surveilled bodily engagement with instruments that
characterises and defines rehearsal. Band members very often used eating and
sexual metaphors to describe to me their own and the audience’s experiences of
instrument sounds, and to alert me to the difference between rehearsal and
performance experiences.
I argue herein that the difference between rehearsal and performance
moments pivots on the experiences that band members have of instrumental
penetration, which they articulated using other kinds of penetrative metaphor.
Each experience is also multisensual. The key to understanding the difference
between rehearsal and performance moments lies not only in the penetration that
an instrument makes into the body and that the body makes into an instrument,
but also in the multisensoiy nature of this penetration. It is the multisensual
character of instrumental penetration that Merleau-Pontian phenomenology
cannot adequately accommodate. In order to explore this multisensual
instrumental penetration, I use the critiques that Michel Serres has made of
Merleau-Pontian phenomenology.'
Serres argues that Merleau-Pontian
phenomenology is capable of looking only at one sense at a time, and does not,
therefore, focus on or adequately describe the life of the body. Rather, in
Serres’s view, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology is capable of viewing and
describing the language that describes the sensual life of die body.
Rehearsals and Performances
Band members, who are full-time musicians working standard eighthour days, rehearse with what they call “monotonous regularity.” A morning or
afternoon portion of each working day, usually some three to four hours, is spent
in rehearsal. Rehearsals are all about tongues, lips, fingers, hands, feet, and
respiration. A great deal of the players’ self-conscious attentions are directed
towards the manner in which these bodily parts and fimctions meet with
instrument objects to “buzz,” “blow,” “hit,” “bang,” “tongue,” “lip,” and
“breathe” into them. Although these touches administered to the instrument
body sound almost as if they are erotically sensuous experiences, they are not, at